Florian Ebner, Steffen Siegel, Vera Tollmann

jury statement

★★
Germany /// Deutschland
★★

To merely describe this slender folio volume as a catalogue for the photo exhibition of the same name would be to do it a disservice. Echoing the subject of the exhibition, held at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the graphic design is a self-experiment on whether size does indeed matter. When visuals are manipulated by altering dimensions, taking things out of context, exaggerating and reinterpreting them, it can change the whole picture. In photography, shifts in scale can entail significant shifts in meaning that often go unnoticed.

The first part of the book pitches us straight into the images, which are splashed across page after wordless page. This section addresses the question of the ideal size in which to show a detail. For optimum comparison, the images, some of which are two metres across, are shown at a scale of 1:1. Being able to include only a piece of the image, however, inevitably leads to some extreme crops, while hinting at the fact that photography is also always about what you leave out. In the table of contents, we thus get lines of outsize type in an elegant italic; these list the titles of the essays that follow. The punchline comes in the form of equally surprising footnotes, where what is usually the small print is reproduced in an enormous point size. In the final part, the catalogue proper, all the works are accompanied by huge captions in an inflated type.

Throughout this perfectly realised book, the visible design choices are all subservient to the main theme. The format, glossy dust jacket, paper type and single typeface nod to the 1990s, albeit in an understated way. That balance between subtlety and boldness is what makes the book so appealing.